She hardly has her coat off before she’s looking inside the cabinets and the fridge to see if my father has bought all the right ingredients for the Christmas Eve dinner. I can hear her ticking items off under her breath: pearl onions; nutmeg; beef broth. She has brought her own apron, her own potato peeler. She gives me the job of peeling the potatoes with the new peeler, which works so well I don’t mind the chore. I keep the water running at a slow trickle from the tap because it makes the peeling and the cleaning easier. Beside me my grandmother is cutting the tough skin off the turnips. She has a blade that’s about a foot long, the kind that might figure in a horror movie. She digs into the turnip with both hands on the back of the blade and pushes down. The knife makes a hard thwap against the cutting board. I’m surprised at the strength in her arms. From behind, my grandmother is one large mass with a small head of tight gray curls. From the side, she is almost pretty.
“I got my period,” I say.
My grandmother sets the knife down and wipes her hands on her apron. She pretends she doesn’t already know. She envelops me in her arms. I still have a peeler and a potato in my hands.
“How do you feel?” she asks, holding me at arm’s length.
“Good,” I say. “I had cramps, but I don’t now.”
“Do you have pads?”
I nod.
“Do you need any help?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
She puts her fingers under my chin and raises my face to hers. “If you ever want to talk about anything, you just have to ask me. It’s been a long time since I had any bother with that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know all about what to do.”
She gives me another hug, and I feel in her squeeze a reluctance to let me go.
“Grammie,” I say after a time.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Do you know what pfeffernusse is?”
While my grandmother cooks, my father and I go out into the woods to cut down a tree. I worry that we’ve waited too long; it’s late afternoon, and the sun is about to set. We have hundreds of trees to choose from; the problem will be clearing away the snow around it so that we can bring it inside. We both carry shovels, and my father has an ax.
Neither one of us says a word the entire time we are in the woods. The silence seems perfectly natural and comfortable and doesn’t register until later that night. We are on snowshoes, and I follow in his footsteps. I have a shovel in one hand, so I can’t put my thumbs and forefingers together, but I’m clicking pictures all the same. Of pink snow crawling up the side of a tree. Of the tips of the pines, rust-colored, on fire. Of tiny arrowhead tracks that skitter around a bush. My father stops and shakes the branches of what looks like a pointed bush. He begins to brush away the snow from the lower branches. Where the snow is hardpacked, we dig with shovels. It doesn’t take us very long to clear around the base of the tree. My father bends over and takes a few swings with the ax. The tree topples and we pull it from the snow. We lay it down. It’s a skinny tree with a few bare spots, but it will do. My father picks up the heavy end, I the other, and we carry it back to the house.
The tree is too tall, so my father has to take it outside again to saw off six inches. Once we’ve screwed it into the stand, I step back and see that it’s tilted. We work on it for a while, until my father finally decides to tie it to a doorknob so that it won’t fall into the room. He sorts the lights and strings them on the tree while I lay the ornaments on the table.
I am tall enough this year to reach the top branches of the tree. I hang the ornaments in an orderly way, trying to put them equidistant from one another. My father leaves me to it and goes upstairs to have a shower. The tree has fat colored lights, the kind my father says he had in his childhood. Last year, Jo’s tree had tiny white lights with silver balls and scarlet ribbons and looked like something on the cover of a magazine.
When I am done I step back to admire my creation. I admire it in the reflections from the three darkened windows. I call my grandmother in and make her admire it, too. I sit in my father’s leather chair, trying to decide whether or not I should move the macaroni plate to hide a bare spot, when I suddenly remember Charlotte. In jail. On Christmas Eve. I slap my hands over my face. She is in a cell. Her parents must know now about the baby. She might have to stay in jail for a very long time.
I lean my head back against the leather cushion and stare at the ceiling. I know that Charlotte will always be with me, that I will think about her every day. She will become one of my small cast of characters with whom I frequently speak, whose lives I daily have to imagine. There are four of them in my little playlet: my mother, who remains the same age she was when she died and who gives me bits of advice on how to handle my father; Clara, who is three and who is getting a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas; Charlotte, who will do my hair and shop with me for clothes and be my friend; and also Baby Doris, who might be having a bottle now. Or a nap.
I sit for a few minutes. I decide to put all the presents under the tree. There aren’t too many, but I notice my name on a few. In the morning I will give my father the mittens I made, my grandmother the necklace with the sculpted pendant. She’ll make a fuss and exclaim, but I’m guessing she’ll probably never wear the necklace once she leaves the house.
My grandmother asks me to set the table, which is still sticking halfway out of the kitchen. I arrange it as festively as I can, running an assortment of half-burned candles down the center. I’m trying to think of something we own that will work as napkin rings when I see a flash of lights in the driveway. The car comes to a stop, and the lights go out.
My father, who’s been in the den enjoying the luxury of not having to cook, walks into the kitchen, removing his reading glasses as he does so. “Stay here,” he says to me and my grandmother.
My grandmother comes to stand by my side. We hear a car door shut. A few seconds later I hear a man’s voice.
Detective Warren steps inside the house.
This is it, I think.
I worry about my grandmother. About the dinner she has made. About the presents under the tree. Who will be here to open them?
“I know I’ve come at a bad time,” Warren says.
“Come in,” my father says, shutting the door.
Warren does a quick two-step on the mat. His navy coat is opened, and the scarf hangs loose. I am used to his face, but I wonder at its effect on my grandmother: the gravelly scars, the flap of skin.
“Nicky,” Warren says.
“Hi,” I say.
“This is my mother,” my father says.
“How do you do?” Warren says to my grandmother. “I’m George Warren.”
No Detective. No state police.
My grandmother, both hands on my shoulders, merely nods. If Warren wants to arrest me, he’ll have to tear me from my grandmother’s grip.
“You’re about to eat,” Warren says. “Smells great.”
“What can I do for you?” my father asks.
“I know it’s a terrible time—I’ve got to get home to my boys, too—but there’s something I think you should see.”
“Where?”
“Not too far from here.”
“It can’t wait?” my father asks.
“I think you should see this now,” Warren says.
I see a look—a kind of truce?—pass between my father and the detective.
“How long will it take?” my father asks.
“Half an hour? Forty minutes?”
My grandmother lets go of my shoulders and slips her apron over her head. “Don’t worry about dinner,” she says to my father. “I have to go upstairs and unpack anyway.” She folds the apron and sets it on a chair.
My father takes his jacket from a hook.
“I think Nicky should come with us,” Warren says.
My father climbs into the passenger seat; I slip in back. Warren makes the turn and heads down the hill. I notice there’s a Snickers bar tucked into the backseat p
ocket.
“Charlotte Thiel’s brother came and posted bail,” Warren says as the Jeep bounces over the ruts. “Problem is, she can’t leave the state. She’s gone to stay with an aunt for the time being.”
“Until the trial,” my father says.
“Or until she pleads.”
“What will the sentence be?” my father asks.
Warren makes the turn onto the road that leads into town. “Depends on James Lamont, whether he helps her out or not. Depends on Lamont’s lawyer. Three years maybe? Worst case, she’ll be out in fifteen months.”
“And Lamont? Where is he?”
“His parents went to Switzerland to get him and bring him back. Now, him—he’s looking at some serious time. Ten, twelve years. Might get out in six. The jury won’t like it that he fled the country. And he can kiss bail good-bye.”
“Does Charlotte have a lawyer?” my father asks.
“Her brother is taking care of that.”
I wonder what Charlotte’s brother looks like. What happened when they first saw each other? Did they embrace, a family in crisis? Or was he horrified? Furious? Struck dumb?
“Where does the aunt live?” my father asks.
“Manchester,” Warren says. “I can get you the address.”
“Please,” my father says.
Thank you, Dad.
I will send Charlotte the necklace, I decide. I will tell her that I got my period right after she left us. When she gets out of jail, she will call me.
We leave the village of Shepherd and travel on Route 89. The roads are completely clear. After twenty minutes or so, Warren slows at an exit and takes a right off the ramp. Immediately we are in a vaguely familiar town, one my father and I might have driven through during our aimless journeys in the summer.
We pass through a small village, mostly dark but for a Shell station on a corner. For a few blocks the streetlights have wreaths on them. I wonder what time it is: five o’clock? six? Warren takes a left and a right and travels up a hill into a neighborhood. I peer into the houses as we go. We pass a house with dozens of cars parked outside. Through the windows I can see men in jackets and women in dresses holding drinks. A party. A party would be fun, I think.
Warren looks at a piece of paper with an address on it and makes another turn. We are on a street lined with smallish two-story houses. Some have spotlights on their doors; others have lights along the rooflines and in the windows. One is completely dark but for a single blue bulb in each window. The effect is cold and unearthly. The road is plowed but still white. Snow is banked high on both sides. I’m counting Christmas trees as we go.
Warren studies the numbers on the houses. He slows the Jeep and pulls to the curb at the corner. He rolls down his window and peers into a house. “This should be it,” he says, pointing.
It’s a two-story house with a sloping roof and a room sticking out the side nearest us. The room has a lot of windows and might be considered a porch. The owners must have decided to use the porch as a dining room, however, because a number of people are sitting around a large oval table.
I roll my window down, too, and cold air rushes into the truck. “I got the address about an hour ago,” Warren says. “Wanted to see the place for myself. It looks like we got lucky.”
The table is well lit from a chandelier overhead. I spot a turkey, red flowers, white bowls of food. I count half a dozen kids, at least that many adults. There’s an old woman at one end of the table, a man at the other. A boy reaches for a pitcher. A woman is walking back and forth under the archway of the wide opening from the dining room to the rest of the house. She’s holding a baby against her shoulder.
I take a quick glance at my father.
The baby is wrapped in a white blanket that reveals only a tiny face, spiky black hair. The woman paces with a little jounce in her step, as if she is trying to get the baby to fall asleep or to burp her. She laughs and says something to a man at the table. The baby bobs her head and buries her face in the woman’s shoulder. Almost absentmindedly, the woman gives the top of the baby’s head a kiss.
“This is a foster home,” Warren says. “The baby will almost certainly be adopted. White baby. Infant. But this is a good place to be for now. Some of them aren’t so good, but this is a good one. After this I won’t know where she’s gone. It’s why I wanted you to see her now.”
My father is still, as if watching a critical scene in a film, a scene that makes you hold your breath. I know that he is thinking about Clara, and that there is, inside of him, an immense pain. But there is, too, a kind of healing, the equivalent of a sigh released. Through a lighted window we watch Baby Doris, whose real name we will never know.
After a time my father turns. “You ready?” he asks.
I try to speak. I shake my head.
My father nods, and Warren knows to put the Jeep in gear.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the wonderful Ginger Barber—agent, confidante, good friend.
About the Author
Anita Shreve is the author of the acclaimed novels Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilot’s Wife, Fortune’s Rocks, The Last Time They Met, Sea Glass, and All He Ever Wanted. She lives in Massachusetts.
Anita Shreve, Light on Snow
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